Greek
Pandora, the First Woman
The gods pooled their gifts to build one flawless girl, then handed her to mankind as a punishment; when she lifted the lid of a jar, only Hope stayed behind.
121 published retellings across 6 pantheons.
The gods pooled their gifts to build one flawless girl, then handed her to mankind as a punishment; when she lifted the lid of a jar, only Hope stayed behind.
Born from sea-foam and the severed flesh of Heaven, the goddess whose power bent gods and beasts alike, and whom only three could resist.
The newborn who burst his swaddling bands to claim the lyre, the bow and the truth of Zeus, then killed a dragon to found the oracle that spoke for him.
The small child who climbed onto her father's knee and asked for a bow, eternal maidenhood and all the mountains in the world, then took them.
She was born from her father's skull in full armour, spear already levelled, and the whole of Olympus reeled at the sight of a daughter equal to Zeus.
He beat a giant with a lie and a sharpened stake, then threw it all away for the pleasure of hearing the monster learn his name.
A caged inventor reasons that if the sea and the land are watched, the sky at least lies open. He builds his son a pair of wings, and gives him one rule to keep him alive.
The twice-born stranger who turns pirates into dolphins and a mother into her son's killer, the loosener of cares who is lethal to anyone who denies him.
He drew the darkness by lot, not by choice, and the Greeks feared his name so much they called him the Rich One instead.
The goddess of marriage who ruled beside Zeus and warred against him in the same breath, dressing for seduction as a strategy of state.
The strongman son of Zeus strangled serpents in his cradle and cleaned the world of monsters, but the labour that made him a god began in the ruin of his own house.
Born at dawn, he had invented the lyre and stolen a god's cattle before nightfall. The trickster who talks his way onto Olympus and walks the dead down to Hades.
A face no one could look at and live, and a hero who beat it by refusing to look. The only mortal monster in a family of immortal ones, killed in her sleep.
Locked in a bronze cell, cast to sea in a chest, sent for a head no man could look at and live. The hero who won by never looking, and killed his grandfather by accident.
He drew the grey sea by lot and never forgave a slight, splitting rock with his trident to raise storms, drown heroes and shake the earth itself.
A prince who chose the killers' road, unwound a thread through the dark to end a monster, and forgot a single sail. The founder Athens made in its own image, remembered for what he built and what he abandoned.
For ten years the sky itself hung in the balance, until Zeus loosed the hundred-armed prisoners of the deep and the world caught fire.
There is no ancient list of the Twelve. What the oldest poets give us instead is a household with a throne room, a swallowed generation, and a family quarrel that never quite ends.
Before there was a world there was only a gap, and out of that yawning dark the first gods came to be.
The god who overthrew his father by cunning and force, and then made himself the guardian of oaths.
Odin raises a dead wise-woman to make her speak, and she gives him the whole arc of the world: its making, his own hidden secrets, and the fire that ends it all.
Half her body the hue of living flesh, half of it corpse-blue, she keeps a hall where the table is called Famine and the bed is called Care: the daughter Odin cast into the mist to rule everyone who dies quietly.
Downward and northward, under a root of the world-ash, lies the cold country that takes everyone who dies quietly: nine lightless valleys, a river that clangs, a gold-roofed bridge and a gate so high a god must leap it.
Three maidens mighty in wisdom come up from a dwelling beneath the world-ash, cut marks into wood, and lay down the lives of the sons of men.
The boldest of the Aesir laid his sword-hand in a wolf's jaws to bind a doom he could not defeat, and lost it: the god who kept a pledge he knew was false.
Not a twilight but a doom: the wolf runs free, the serpent floods the land, a ship of dead men's nails breaks loose, and the gods ride knowingly to a battle the prophecy says they cannot win, on a field a hundred miles square.
A giant buries the thunder-god's hammer eight leagues down and names his ransom: the goddess Freyja for his bride. So the strongest of the gods is bound into a bridal veil and sent to a wedding he means to end with a killing.
A wolf the gods reared at home, two iron chains he snapped like kindling, and a ribbon of six impossible things: how the Aesir caught the beast fated to kill Odin, and what it cost the one god brave enough to feed him.
Odin flung a newborn snake into the sea to be rid of a prophecy, and it grew until it ringed the whole earth and bit its own tail: the boundary of the world, and the one foe fated to kill Thor even as Thor kills it.
The best of the gods, so fair that light streamed from him, at home in a hall nothing unclean could enter: the portrait of a god the myth was built to take away.
A god the whole world had sworn never to harm, a sprig of mistletoe no one thought to ask, and a blind brother's hand: how the north's best-loved god was murdered into Hel and the doom of the gods began.
How poetry got into the world: a murdered sage, a mead brewed from his blood, and the god who slept three nights with a giant's daughter to steal it, then left her to grief.
Before earth or heaven there was a yawning gap, and on either side of it fire and ice: how the first giant quickened between them, and how the world was built from his murdered body.
She rides to the battlefield in a chariot drawn by cats and carries home half the slain, weeps red gold for a husband who wandered off, and is the goddess men pray to when they are in love: the strangest and most renowned of the Norse goddesses.
He climbed into a seat that was not his, looked out over all the worlds, and fell so hard for a giant's daughter that he gave away the one sword that could have saved him: the Vanir god of the fruitful season, lord of the elves, and the most renowned of the gods you called on for peace.
She knows the fate of every living thing and never speaks it, and when the one doom she tried to bar comes for her son, all she can do is weep: the foremost of the goddesses, undone by a single overlooked shrub.
The handsome, fickle mischief-monger of the Aesir who drags the gods into ruin and then, more often than not, is the only one clever enough to haul them back out again.
The strongest of the gods wakes to find his hammer gone, and the only way to get it back is to put on a bridal veil: a portrait of the Aesir's giant-killer at his most terrifying and his most absurd.
The great ash that binds the worlds is not a serene axis but a creature in perpetual pain: gnawed above, rotting within, torn from below, and still standing green over the well where the Norns pour their clay.
He hanged himself on the world-tree and gave an eye to a well, and in return he took the runes and the deepest draught of wisdom: the god who paid for knowledge in his own flesh.
Ra loosed his own Eye on rebellious mankind, then could not call her off. So he brewed seven thousand jars of blood-red beer and flooded the fields, and let the killer drink herself gentle.
Reared in the marshes until his arm was strong, the falcon-son came for the throne his uncle stole: three ancient traditions, a slaughter, a tribunal and a war, and not one clean duel among them.
A ram-headed sun hauled by ropes through a valley of the dead, a serpent staked with knives, a rebirth out of a monster's tail: the Egyptian underworld the sun and the dead must cross before dawn.
To bite the ground is to bite a god. He is the floor of the world, the judge at the head of the Nine, and the father who hands the throne of Egypt down to his son.
A love that began in the dark of the womb and did not end at the grave: the sister-wife who searched the whole earth for her murdered husband, and drew an heir from him after death.
A widow cuts a lock of her hair, puts on mourning, and walks out into the marshes to find a husband her brother has thrown to the water: the long search for the body of Osiris, and why no single ancient text tells it whole.
Truth, justice and the balance of the cosmos wear a single ostrich feather; against it the heart of the dead is weighed, and the gods themselves are said to live on her.
Eighty years of lawsuits and duels for a dead king's throne: an uncle and a nephew, a bench of gods that cannot make up its mind, and a mother who will not let her son lose.
A brother's fitted coffin, a body torn into pieces and scattered, and the magic of a wife who gathered them back: how the murdered king was made whole and got an heir from beyond death.
A goddess carved in statues enough to face every day of the year, whose breath was plague and whose priests were physicians: the lioness the Egyptians both feared and begged.
Once a year the god was carried out to die, hunted to his grave on the desert flats, and brought home again: what a royal treasurer, a Greek philosopher and a temple archive each saw of the drama, across seventeen centuries.
Before she was the gentle cat with kittens at her feet, she was a lioness of the sun a dead king dared not offend. Egypt drank more wine at her festival than in all the rest of the year.
The god of Memphis made no clay and spilled no seed. He devised the cosmos in his heart and spoke it with his tongue, then built the very bodies the other gods would live inside.
She never lifts a claw and never speaks a line: the beast who crouches by the scales in the Hall of the Two Truths does one thing only, and it is the worst thing the Egyptian afterlife could imagine.
Reed-pen in one hand and palette in the other, the ibis-headed god stands at the Great Balance and writes down whether a dead soul lived true: the recorder, the proclaimer, and the very word that ordered the world.
Felt like wind through feathers and never seen, the self-made creator of Thebes whose very name means concealment: how a local city-god rose to become Amun-Re, king of all the gods.
A black pig, a mighty storm, an eye put out: how the Egyptians told the wounding of Horus two ways at once, and why the healed eye became the very word for wholeness.
A carrion bird settles over a murdered god at Nedit, beats life back into him with her wings, and draws from the dead body a son sharp as a star: the strangest conception in Egyptian myth, and the making of an avenger.
A sun-disk cradled in the notch between two hills: the Egyptian sign for the horizon was also a place, the gated seam where sky, earth and the underworld meet and the sun goes in and out of the world.
She arches over the whole earth and holds it in her arms; the dead king is her firstborn, the stars are her thousand souls, and each night she swallows the sun to give it back at dawn.
The jackal on the desert ridge, black as fresh silt and embalmer's resin: the god who washed the entrails of Osiris, kept watch over the corpse through the night, and stood at the balance where the heart was weighed.
Storm-god, desert-lord and fratricide: the red god the Egyptians both needed and feared, murderer of Osiris and rival of Horus, who was never only a villain.
Before the world there was only dark water, and one god who made himself: how Atum rose on the first dry hill, spat the twins Shu and Tefnut from his own body, and fathered the Nine gods of Heliopolis.
The falcon-headed heir who takes back a stolen throne: son of a murdered god, raised in a marsh, and vindicated before the assembled gods as the rightful king of Egypt.
The completed sun going down, whose name means both 'finished' and 'not-be': the Heliopolitan creator drawn as a pharaoh, who lifts the dead king to the sky and will one day draw the whole world back into the flood.
Weret-hekau, Great of Magic: the goddess who reassembled a murdered god, hid her son in a marsh, and wrung the secret name of the sun-god out of his own poisoned body.
Egypt worshipped him for two and a half thousand years and never once wrote his story down: the green mummiform king who absorbed a jackal god, rose as Orion, and lent his name to every vindicated corpse.
Beetle at dawn, blazing disk at noon, a tottering old man sinking into the west: the creator sun-god of Heliopolis who sails the sky by day and fights his way through the underworld by night.
Three storm-gods, three chaos-serpents, three ways to win. Indra and Zeus burn their dragons with the thunderbolt, but the god of Izumo does something neither of them does: he pulls a sword out of the dead beast.
One chronicle has the young prince weep that his father must want him dead; the other has the emperor beat his breast and cry "Oh! Our son!" Two eighth-century courts, eight years apart, reading a single father and son in opposite keys.
One sentence, copied and revised across roughly eleven hundred years, tells the emperors of Japan why they may rule: because the sun-goddess told their ancestor to, and told him it would last as long as heaven and earth.
A household cat rears on its hind legs to lick the lamp-oil, wraps a towel round its head and dances: the domestic monster-cat of the Edo books, one branch of a single cat-spirit the sources never cleanly split.
For a thousand years an unmarried princess was scorched out of a tortoise-shell and sent to serve the sun goddess at Ise, where she might not name death, blood, or the Buddha.
The sun-goddess hands her newborn grandson a mirror and tells him to reverence it as her own spirit, then sends him down the Floating Bridge of Heaven to rule the earth: how the imperial line came down from the sky, and why its rulers die like flowers.
His name means "the cormorant-feather roof was not finished". Born at the edge of land and sea, Ugayafukiaezu stands between the gods of Japan's oldest chronicles and the human imperial line.
How the Japanese cosmos stacks in three storeys, and how gods and the dead move between them: a heaven above, a reed-plain between, a country of the dead below, and the doors, roads and one-way seals that join them.
The sun-goddess bolts herself inside a stone door and the world goes black; it takes a forged mirror, a ribald dance and eight hundred myriad gods laughing in the dark to trick the light back out.
Two gods stand on a bridge above a formless sea, lower a jewelled spear into the brine and stir until it curdles: how the first island rose from the drippings, and how a botched courtship had to be done over before Japan could be born.
He followed his dead wife into the land of the dead to bring her home, lit a single forbidden light to look at her, and fled a rotting queen: the myth that gave Japan its death, its cleansing rite, and its three brightest gods.
A rich man shot arrows at a rice-cake for sport, and the wasted rice rose up as a white bird and flew to a mountain where rice began to grow: the founding legend of Japan's most-worshipped kami, whose name means the rice becomes.
Born from a washed nose, he wept the green mountains bare and was cast out of two worlds before he ever drew a sword on the eight-headed serpent: the most turbulent of the Japanese gods, expelled troublemaker turned culture-hero of Izumo.
Born from the right eye of a god washing himself clean of the dead, the moon drew his sword on a goddess who fed him from her mouth, and for that the sun turned her face away: the quiet god whose one act set the sun and moon apart.
Not a mountain and not a sky-city but a plain: the celestial country of rice-fields and river-councils where the sun-goddess reigns, the cosmos opens, and the line of emperors takes its first breath.
A mirror forged to trap the sun, a sword drawn from a monster's tail, and a string of curved jewels: how three objects became the proof that Japan's emperors were born to rule.
A shadowy country of rot and gloom where a single mouthful of the dead's cooking binds you forever: the underworld of the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki, and the day it was sealed off from the living.
The radiance that shone through all six quarters at birth, the goddess who armed herself like a warrior against her own brother and then shut the door on the world: ancestress of the emperors and light of the High Plain of Heaven.
He stirred the sea to a curd and raised the first island from a spear-tip, then lost his wife to the underworld and came back to wash the pollution off: from the water of his cleansing were born the sun, the moon and the storm.
She spoke first at the pillar and bore the world a crooked child, then bore it right: the islands of Japan and the gods of sea and wind and fire, until the last birth killed her and made her queen of the dead.
A king who let no bride reach her wedding bed, and the wild man the gods made out of clay to break him: how the two who first tried to kill each other became the one bond in the oldest story we have.
Goddess of desire and of war in a single body, the morning star who walked down alive into the land of no return: boldest of the great gods, and the most dangerous to love.
Dust for bread, mud for meat, and feathers for clothes: the great below of the Sumerians and Babylonians, a house with a bolt on the door and a queen who lets no one out.
A king took axes to the god's own house, packed the temple's gold into leather bags, and loaded it onto ships. So the poets, four centuries after the city fell, explained why Agade vanished from the earth.
With the sea dead beneath his foot, the champion turned to a quieter labour: fixing the stations of the sky, dividing the year, and handing the moon a monthly work-order. This is the creation of measured time, spoken into being at the world's first dawn.
The gods are digging canals and weeping over the work when their oldest mother carries their tears down into the deep to wake her sleeping son. What she is called, and what she made, is a question two thousand years of clay cannot quite settle.
A single clay writ, sealed and laid over the heart, carried the right to decree the fate of the whole created order. Whoever held it ruled the universe, so the history of Mesopotamian kingship is the history of who held it next.
Forty years the lesser gods dug the rivers by hand. Then they burned their tools and surrounded their master's house in the dark, and the only way to end the strike was to build a creature that could take the work off them.
The young storm-god who alone dared face the salt-water chaos, drove the winds down her throat and split her body into the sky, and traded a single victory for the kingship of all the gods.
The strongest king who ever lived is dying in his own bed, and in a dream he must stand before the gods and hear them decide what a man is allowed to keep.
A goddess so fearsome she was barely worshipped, married off to a different god in every century that told her tale, and finally borrowed by Greek sorcerers who never knew what her name once meant.
He kept his seat when the whole assembly of heaven stood, and the discourtesy cost him everything he was: the story of a plague-god who went down to be judged and came back a king of the dead.
The first being in the Babylonian cosmos was fresh water that did nothing but rest, until noise drove it to murder its own children. Then the poem killed it off the page.
The Sumerians never wrote the poem in which heaven and earth are torn apart. They only ever mention it, in the breath before a story begins: once, in the first days, the sky was prised off the ground and the two were shared out among the gods.
Before heaven had a name there were two waters, and they mingled. Everything that followed, the gods, the quarrel, the war that split a body into a sky, began in that first commingling of the fresh and the salt.
Once a year the most powerful man in Babylonia was stripped of his crown, struck on the cheek and made to weep, so that a council of gods could settle his fate and the land's for the twelve months to come.
She was the salt ocean before the ocean had a shore, the mother of every god, and the body a younger god would one day split open to roof the sky. This is Tiamat as a being: her names, her monstrous brood, and how her carcass became the world.
The storm-bird has stolen the writ of fate and made his own word law, and every god the assembly names to fight him refuses. The recovery is a hunt won not by strength but by a trick that turns the thief's own magic dead.
One short, forbidden tablet maps the Babylonian universe as six stone floors stacked in open air: three heavens above, three earths below, each a coloured slab laid down by a single arranging god. It is a diagram, not a story, and it argues with itself.
The war-god lies too tired to rise, until his own heart and seven restless weapons talk him into a slaughter no god can call off. Only his own minister can end it, and only by making war on a mountain instead of on men.
For eleven days each spring the priests of Babylon washed a god, stripped a king of his crown and slapped him until he wept, then carried the whole company of the gods out through the glazed gate to renew the year.
The god whose name every herbalist invokes governs a pharmacy of three hundred and sixty-five drugs ranked like a royal court, yet the tradition itself admits he could not have written a word of the book that bears his name.
Ten suns climbed into the sky at once and the world began to cook: the crops charred, the trees died, and the people had nothing left to eat. So the sage-emperor Yao sent for an archer.
For eighteen thousand years a giant grew inside a shell of chaos, holding the raw sky and the raw earth apart with his own body; when at last he died, there was nowhere left for him to go but into the world.
Dig in the fields of the old north country and you may turn up a skull hard as bronze, or a tooth two inches long that no hammer will break: the bones, people said, of the horned god of war the Yellow Emperor could kill but never quite be rid of.
When the old order collapsed and the fiercest of the warlords could not be subdued, a man who could speak from the cradle trained in shield and dagger-axe, broke the rebel Chiyou on the wilderness of Zhuolu, and was raised up as the first Son of Heaven of a civilised world.
A jade-railed paradise in the northwest where four world-rivers rise, deathless trees grow and a stair of three tiers climbs out of the earth and into Heaven itself.
She had ten children and every one of them was a sun. In a gulf of sweet water at the edge of the world she bathed them, and sent them out one at a time to cross the sky.
Before she was the jade-decked matron of the immortals, she was a cave-dwelling numen with a tiger's teeth and a leopard's tail, whistling on a western mountain and presiding over plague and ruin.
He hewed the first plough from raw wood, then turned on his own body as a laboratory, tasting the hundred plants and meeting seventy poisons in a single day so that his people would know what to eat and what to fear.
He looked up at the images in heaven and down at the patterns on earth, and out of that reading drew the eight trigrams, the fishing-net, and the first law of husband and wife.
Supreme sovereign of Heaven and head of a celestial civil service, whose whole war machine could not subdue one stone monkey, and who had to send west for the Buddha to save his own throne.
Serpent-bodied and human-faced, she patted the first people out of yellow mud, then smelted five-coloured stones to patch a sky that had split from pole to pole.